AUTHOR ARCHIVES

Tom Shoop

Tom Shoop is vice president and editor in chief at Government Executive Media Group, where he oversees both print and online editorial operations. He started as associate editor of Government Executive magazine in 1989; launched the company’s flagship website, GovExec.com, in 1996; and was named editor in chief in 2007.

October 25, 2004
The Wall Street Journal uncovers a draft directive from Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld's office instructing Pentagon officials to involve the State Department and other civilian agencies in future planning for postwar operations. (The text of the draft is here, if you're a WSJ subscriber.) Good move, but arguably a little ...

October 25, 2004
First Time magazine on Sunday, then The New York Times today, push a story that could raise new questions about Halliburton. Before the start of the Iraq war, Bunnatine Greenhouse, the top civilian contracting official at the Army Corps of Engineers, expressed concerns that Halliburton officials were allowed to sit ...

October 25, 2004
The Associated Press reports that the Bush administration has deployed a "platoon of federal employees" to "trumpet" the president's accomplishments in the closing days of the campaign. Well, not exactly a platoon--it's mostly the same cadre of Cabinet officers that often hits the road to campaign for the boss at ...

October 22, 2004
Note to CIA managers: Watch your backs. The Washington Post got its hands on a speech by new CIA Director Porter Goss in which he declares, "we must collapse bureaucratic layers. I say this with fervor." The layers headed for imminent collapse don't include the one Congress is about to ...

October 22, 2004
Today, the American Enterprise Institute takes on the issue of how John Kerry would govern. Consensus: pretty hard to tell at this point. Interesting, though, that more than one panelist essentially endorsed a Bush campaign theme: Kerry's not much of a legislator. On the Hill, he's been more interested in ...

October 22, 2004
Margo Hammond, the book editor of the St. Petersburg Times, isn't too thrilled about the nomination of the on the 9/11 commission report for a National Book Award. Sure, the report is novelistic and all, she writes on the Web site of the Poynter Institute (a school for journalists), "but ...

October 21, 2004
Pretty interesting panel discussion at the American Enterprise Institute in Washington today on "How Would George W. Bush Govern in a Second Term?" The Brookings Institution's Tom Mann pointed out that in policy terms, second-term records in the modern presidency are less than spectacular. Even those presidents who aren't sidetracked ...

October 15, 2004
Why do federal officials hide behind the cloak of anonymity-and why does the news industry indulge them? Is that cherished Washington institution, the anonymous background briefing, about to go the way of the dinosaur? Don't bet on it. For those who are blessedly unfamiliar with the anonymous backgrounder, it works ...

October 1, 2004
Hollywood gets over its obsession with bureaucratic ineptitude and corruption. Time was, the irritating, obnoxious, moronic postal carrier Newman from Seinfeld was about the best federal employees could hope to see of their kind on television. After all, Newman was merely a comic foil. Plots centered around, for example, his ...

September 15, 2004
The quixotic effort to give managers more leeway to make minor workplace decisions. In late August, the National Treasury Employees Union joined with its sometime rival, the American Federation of Government Employees, to file a friend-of-the-court brief asking a federal appeals court to overturn a Federal Labor Relations Authority ruling ...